If you're new to this a USATF club, Sisu, went to Club XC nationals for the first time. They made a youtube video of their trip. It showed them travelling there, in restaurants, on the course and racing (they finished in the back of the pack). Next thing they knew they got a takedown notice from USATF for their video on youtube. Essentially, USATF said they owned the rights to everything shot at the meet (the club reps do not remember signing anything or the entry they signed saying as much).

Regardless of the technicality of who owns the rights to footage of mid pack racing at Club Nationals (footage with almost no commercial value), it is bad policy to prevent USATF member clubs from promoting the sport.

After more grassroots rumbling, USATF CEO Max Siegel acted quickly and today said USATF would contact Youtube to reinstate the video. He wrote,

"USATF now realizes promotion of the sport by its clubs is a good thing even if it involves rights that USATF is still claiming to own."

Bravo.

A good decision to Max and a sign he is realizing he just can't deal with the business side of USATF. He is the face and CEO of the organization.

****The letter does have a paragraph that I don't quite understand. Max writes, "After speaking with several individuals in the office, it appears that a full-length, high-quality video of the race had been posted and cooperatively removed after communication with our office. It was similar to coverage that we would provide on USATF.tv. There was also removed a shorter video of lower quality that was focused on the club. It was NOT (underlined in Max's letter) our intention to have that shorter video removed. Videos like this particular one, which are not commercial efforts and which seek to provide exposure to our dedicated rank-and-file, help the efforts of all of us in the sport."

I contacted Amanda Wright with Sisu and she has no idea what the full-length video referenced in the letter is. It wasn't her video. Anyone know?

According to Amanda Wright in her write-up of what happened to their club's video, Norman Wain, General Counsel to USATF, did admit to Amanda he didn't watch the video, but he did reiterate that USATF had the rights to it. A possible explanation is there was a longer video USATF wanted taken down, they got their legal people involved, legal tried to take everything down, and then the decision makers at USATF clarified they didn't want everything taken down.

It would be much better if our sport was in a position where a big concern of USATF's legal department wasn't fan videos of the club nationals. The NFL has much bigger concerns than trying to enforce a copyright of fan videos of the Superbowl on Youtube. If USATF really views club nationals as a big commercial opportunity we're in trouble. Flotrack and Runnerspace have shown there is a market for charging friends and relatives (and fans) to watch people they know run at invitationals but USATF hopefully has much bigger fish to worry about than mid pack fan videos at club nationals.

wejo wrote:According to Amanda Wright in her write-up of what happened to their club's video, Norman Wain, General Counsel to USATF, did admit to Amanda he didn't watch the video, but he did reiterate that USATF had the rights to it. A possible explanation is there was a longer video USATF wanted taken down, they got their legal people involved, legal tried to take everything down, and then the decision makers at USATF clarified they didn't want everything taken down.

I know multiple people who have had videos taken down by USATF, this has been going on for some time. It seems pretty clear that they have a staffer whose primary job duty is to search the internets for "USATF" videos and get them taken down.

I don't buy the mixup at all. The girl at the National Office was following orders when she took down Sisu's video.

"USATF now realizes promotion of the sport by its clubs is a good thing . . ."

Well, it's good that they are just now coming to the realization that promotion of their sport is a good thing. Better late than never. Wow.

How did they happen on to this novel idea? I mean, who'd have thought that promotion of the sport is a good thing? They must have paid some high-priced corporate life coach to come in and do a brainstorming activity to come up with that.

It's good to see USATF do the right thing here, but wow, are we bush league or what. Seriously, the CEO of USATF has to get involved in a minor issue like a random club's XC highlight video? He is issuing press releases on this? It's sad that it was worth USATF's time to take the video down in the first place, even sadder that there had to be a meeting with the "full senior leadership team" (Max's words) to get the issue rectified. A college intern should have been able to handle this BS in 10-minutes. I say again, bush league.

Maybe this was USATF overcompensating after all the backlash with the Hightower/Bob Hersh controversy. Would be nice to see them do the right thing there too.

wejo wrote:The letter does have a paragraph that I don't quite understand. Max writes, "After speaking with several individuals in the office, it appears that a full-length, high-quality video of the race had been posted and cooperatively removed after communication with our office. It was similar to coverage that we would provide on USATF.tv. There was also removed a shorter video of lower quality that was focused on the club. It was NOT (underlined in Max's letter) our intention to have that shorter video removed. Videos like this particular one, which are not commercial efforts and which seek to provide exposure to our dedicated rank-and-file, help the efforts of all of us in the sport."

I contacted Amanda Wright with Sisu and she has no idea what the full-length video referenced in the letter is. It wasn't her video. Anyone know?

It would be so like USATF to reference a made up non-existent video to cover their asses. "We weren't trying to remove this little club's video, we only wanted to remove that longer one that totally existed."

Kind of reminds me of, "We weren't trying to hire that Dennis Mitchell, it was this 'other' Dennis Mitchell."

That's a reference to 2006 when USATF made convicted doper Dennis Mitchell a USA team coach and then backtracked after backlash, saying they had meant to choose a different Dennis Mitchell who had the same name.

I'm pretty sick of of USATF's dishonesty. It's almost worse than their incompetence.

This wasn't an inadvertent mistake.

They didn't get confused about which video was being pulled.

There was significant back and forth on this issue that would have removed any doubt about what was happening. This was a conscious choice made by USATF's general counsel. Only major backlash caused them to change course.

I'm pretty sick of of USATF's dishonesty. It's almost worse than their incompetence.

This wasn't an inadvertent mistake.

They didn't get confused about which video was being pulled.

There was significant back and forth on this issue that would have removed any doubt about what was happening. This was a conscious choice made by USATF's general counsel. Only major backlash caused them to change course.

Exactly. They will keep on issuing DMCA takedowns for personal video regardless of the fact they don't own the copyright. This time the squeaky wheel got some grease.

This is more evidence the federation doesn't have any interest in promoting the sport at a grassroots level. You can go. Just don't publish anything online.

It's good to see USATF do the right thing here, but wow, are we bush league or what. Seriously, the CEO of USATF has to get involved in a minor issue like a random club's XC highlight video? He is issuing press releases on this? It's sad that it was worth USATF's time to take the video down in the first place, even sadder that there had to be a meeting with the "full senior leadership team" (Max's words) to get the issue rectified. A college intern should have been able to handle this BS in 10-minutes. I say again, bush league.

You have got a good point.

That is what I was alluding too when I said if the club xc nats highlights are a concern for our sport, we're in trouble.

There definitely we're other ways this could have been handled.

I can only think Max got involved with this, with a public release, because they are starting to realize how pissed off most of their membership is on the Stephanie Hightower incident. The Board (and Max Siegel) can in this one instance overrule 85% of their membership but in any representative system if you do that long enough you'll find yourself out of a job. The Board ultimately is accontable to the USATF membership and so is Max.

That youtube video "Joe Below" linked to can't be the longer video because it has been up the entire time. Max in his lengthy response says the longer video was removed.